Protesters Rally Against Manchester Newspaper Column About The Mentally Ill

MANCHESTER – — Protesters — some wearing placards that said, "Scapegoat" — rallied in the town center Friday to counter a newspaper column that warned against blaming society for the troubles of the mentally ill.

Gathered at Center and Main streets, protesters said the column by Journal Inquirer Managing Editor Chris Powell promotes housing and job discrimination. Heather McDonald, one of the leaders, said Powell's column "is purely based on the label rather than the individual."

"Mentally ill people have problems," Powell wrote in the column, published Monday."But then so do the people who have to deal with the mentally ill …" He wrote that while mental illness "may be a neglected public health issue, government won't accomplish much for the mentally ill by blaming society for their bad behavior."

The column was built around reaction to the Dec. 14 massacre in Newtown and a recent exhibit at the state Capitol sponsored by the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. As described in a Feb. 5 story in The Connecticut Mirror, the exhibit included photos of people who described being labeled, shunned and shut out of housing and jobs because of skewed perceptions about mental illness.

Powell cited a quote from mental health and addiction services Commissioner Patricia Rehmer, who told the Mirror that mental illness is "the last bastion of discrimination."

"But discrimination," Powell wrote, "is just a matter of making choices, everyone discriminates every day, and there are different discriminations -- irrational, prejudicial, or hateful, like discrimination by race or ethnicity, and the perfectly sensible, like discrimination by behavior and likely consequences."

He went on to ask whether landlords and employers are "necessarily irrational and hateful" in their reluctance to rent to or employ people who may behave badly, scare their coworkers and be incapacitated at times and yet still prove impossible to evict or fire because of discrimination claims.

"Or are such landlords and employers just protecting themselves against getting stuck with social costs that should fall on the government?" Powell wrote.

McDonald, executive director at Focus on Recovery-United in Middletown, said it was important to speak out now because toxic attitudes and "knee-jerk reactions" about mental illness are flourishing in the wake of the Newtown shootings. Adam Lanza, who killed 20 children and six women at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, has been the focus of much speculation since the shootings, although, as McDonald pointed out, there has been no definitive diagnosis of Lanza as mentally ill.

Deron Drumm, co-executive director of Wethersfield-based Advocacy Unlimited, said, "To label and categorize a group of people is discrimination by definition. "

In an email Friday, Powell said he wanted the column to speak for itself. In the column, he wrote about the effect of the Newtown shootings.

Because the massacre "was committed by a young man who appears to have had some sort of mental illness or personality disorder," Powell wrote, "Connecticut lately has been full of testimony by people about the distressing conduct of mentally ill family members who have refused or been unable to get treatment or whose treatment has failed and who are unable to function normally, either within their families or to earn a living.

"Some of these mentally ill people have been described as dangerous," he wrote, "though on the whole the mentally ill may be no more dangerous than the supposedly sane."

In fact, McDonald said, mentally ill people are more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators. Powell's column, she said, unfairly identifies all mentally ill people as behavior problems.